


my own mother thought i was a monster; she was right of course

by londondungeon2



Series: Gifts for Melodyofthevoid's Royalty AU - invader zim. [2]
Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Bears, Brotherhood, Character Study, Dark Magic, F/F, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mommy Issues, Psychological Trauma, Wakes & Funerals, not beta read we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25464562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londondungeon2/pseuds/londondungeon2
Summary: "Mourners are the wisest of us.”“Do you mourn?”“I, mourn?” Light flickers over rotating fork tongs like blood spilling down stairs. “For a person,no.Other things, without a doubt."
Relationships: Dib & Zib | Zim Number 1, Dib/Zim (Invader Zim), Tak/Invader Tenn
Series: Gifts for Melodyofthevoid's Royalty AU - invader zim. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867648
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	my own mother thought i was a monster; she was right of course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelodyoftheVoid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelodyoftheVoid/gifts).



Zib receives the news of her death in the afternoon, directly after lunch. The taste of haddock is fresh on his tongue like a scar, the only taste he is able to archive with the memory. His hands stop. Lifting from somber notes, some German or French symphony that’s too hard to pronounce, he turns with little surprise or sorrow. The news is not originally meant for him but rather his piano teacher. 

Miss. Tenn - some cousin or sister-in-law or other important person of Miyuki’s bloodline which flows into thousands of tiny rivers - is found deliberately at the kingdom’s doorstep. Her body slept eternal on the bluish stones of Irk’s vast garden, now stained black and icy with her exposed brains. One gardener had found her swelling pink tongue in a wheelbarrow of fertilizer, ebon spots on light ground painting a trail to the rest of her. Animals - mostly squirrels - had gotten to her by then. Zib hums, recognizing the name and able to conger a face (buggish brown eyes, pale fire hair that smoldered up in short curls, darker now with her blood, and a tendency to bite her tongue when nervous) and burns with the knowledge that he _can_ say he knew her, had danced with her once at those pompous parties. He had not expected for his liquidator to steal someone he had touched. 

Perhaps that makes the unfolding era more prominent, even to himself who is shepherding it. 

The messenger - in his anxious explanation - gratifies the point that Tenn Xerxes was last seen attending a Membrane party, under their castle’s sinister roof. Something triumphs in Zib when the stuttering fool explains well, well… the Irkens are taking this as a possible declaration of hostility. War _._ War! Zib glows under his stone facade with pride. Maybe the Irken Empire has finally begun to scratch at their irresistible mosquito bite that demands blood, maybe they tire of all the nobility’s insidious whispers and rumors about occult princes, or maybe Miyuki unintentionally meant to usher him to the throne. 

Who really knows what anyone can foresee with a pint of goat’s blood and a handful of atypical objects - not Zib, _yet_. However, he knows that he is destined for the role of king as much as he is positive that a room housing Miyuki leaves the tips of his fingers bitten with a frosty-mauve hue.

He has yet to truly touch that power, only rippling the surface when he changes the reality for one misfortunate crow - once animated, suddenly shelled in stone. Later, he spends hours fastinatizing with the idea that he might be able to dig into its stomach with an icepick and hammer to pull out tiny organs as stone as the bust of pallas above his chamber door, holding what was supposed warm and slippery now cold and coarse.

As soon as he feels the concrete proof, Zib feels his blueprinted future unfold before him. In his marrowbone is a force that eternally wills evil and eternally works good. There is sacrifice shelled in a lost wife or sibling's blood but a justification shelled in a crown and scepter. Life always has duality - one force cannot go rolling forever and forever without being unopposed, a dinosaur eats a dinosaur, a human kills a human, so it goes. 

The power running through him like a rare nectar dries when the wrinkled hands of Madame. Bitters touch his left shoulder. Blinking under those wide horn-rimmed glasses, Zib looks at the vast, unoccupied room. Oh. His amber eyes squint more in skepticism when he looks upon her pale oval face of melting skin. She is smiling at him.

Does she know! His body seethes with the question, only relaxing after her mouth falls open. “This will be good, we could use a little chaos in our trifling court. Don’t you think so?”

Zib flashes the centipede rows of his teeth, timid enough where he is not seen too eager. Two tiny reflections of his grin shine down upon him, such a familiar face and mannerism. The force must eventually be opposed. “Couldn’t have said it better myself, Madame. B.” 

┅

Zib remembers his first funeral despite his youth. The memory comes to him in only snapshots of a cherry stained coffin, sudden confusion why his mother was being lowered into the ground, the feeling of a broken bone - he had tried to grab her Snow White box before it was rooted like a fruitless seed, falling on cement and breaking his nose - and Dib, who had not cried pitifully like his twin did in deafening bursts, holding a napkin against his face and consoling him.

After the funeral, he had encountered his first nightmares, of his mother’s sand white face dripping with black sludge that was a mixture of mud and slugs’ piss, of his mother blaming him for allowing them to put her in the ground, of no one coming back from the grave because the body in there was comatose.

It was only one funeral yet a good enough foundation to come from. As he leans delicately over the cherry edge, Zib does half expect to see his mother there in that modest blue eyeliner and lovely. The girl in the coffin is lovely nonetheless, but he has different words to share with her corpse.

“You are going to be written about. Despite being a small domino in the grand scheme, you are an important one nonetheless. What your death progresses is beyond you now but it still exists - for that I thank thee. When I’m king, I might make a statue of you. Something pretty, something soft.” 

He drapes a hand upon her shoulder, a resemblance to when he would pull her into a waltz, switching from partner to partner in court. Her skin is a frozen plane, still pliable yet like ice due to lack of heat. Zib’s eyes flicker and seize. On her neck lay pale-purple bruises of fingerprints. Even an excessive use of blush and pigment can not erase the stain of death.

Touching her one last time, hand cupping under her chin like nursing a brittle bone, he imagines her last expressions: a rope twist of pain etched in her eyebrows, the lava lamp of blood under her skin making her face bloom an ugly violetish-red hue like holding a paper up to a flame and tinting it a yellow, and the tears like comets blown off courses down her cheeks. 

He relishes in that image like someone would under a sunrise’s warmth.

Deliberate, as if he does not want to abandon his success so soon, Zib moves so his scary younger sister has time to say her condolences. Gaz blinks open her left eye directly in his vision. He wonders if she knows like Madame B might have.

It occurs to him with a harsher reality, one that is coupled with edges and tangibility, that he hopefully will one day see his older brother in one of these permanent beds. One day, no matter if Zib’s coup fails, Dib will have to in life’s insidious duty lay his head on a white pillow for the last time. Over the moonscape profile of his kin, Zib will smell freshly rooted earth and a sympathy spray of freshly picked chrysanthemums, with the knowledge he will have to skin off Dib’s eyelids if he ever wants to halt that endmost blink. How common of life, he surmises.

His coup lingering in mind, Zib starts to wonder where the most important mourner is. Sitting between his brother and the empty seat which his sister would soon occupy, he steals a glance at the countering front row with Dib’s bethroned and family. Someone is missing a husband and sister-in-law, Zib learns. He cranes his neck a couple of times until he spouts both of them, floating on an iceberg far from the rest of the funeral.

Tak stands there, forlorn, with Tenn’s grizzly bear companion. It was a present from Empress Miyuki, one that the widowed lover might have the pleasure to cast her screaming grief into the nebulous fur of Tenn’s monstrous pet like arrows. Empress Miyuki was always gifting exotic animals - Zib hoped never to receive one because ultimately he would have to kill it too.

One abject hand rests timid on the bear’s neck, scratching numbly. The other lies - almost looking broken at the knuckles like a fallen ballerina - limp in the hand of her older brother, husband to prince Red. Her brother, white button-up switched to black and knees bent into yellow grass, is whispering to her - asking her to move with him to the coffin or asking if she wishes to leave?

As the only nonpareil Irken guard, it is thrilling and frightening to observe Tak in such a state. Her veil is not pinned correctly, her corset angles her triangle torso so looks ready to snap off, and the laces of boots lay sloppy like twitching snakes at her feet. Once so pristine in her routinely measured uniforms, the disarray of her current outfit is striking. However, the most salient part is her face. 

Reeds of violet falls in a tangled web across her face as if a cataclysmic hurricane had blown her down. Squeezed between the snare, washed out mauve stares out without any real dictation. Tak once held a monarch gaze, the capsules of crimson-blue in her skulls ablaze. She, Zib notes with a snarl, looks pathetic. Yet, Zib startles when those eyes fall upon him; they are empty pits, nobody is home, that chill him to marrowbone. Disheveled and slipping, she whispers back to her pitiful brother. They, bear included, start walking over. 

Tak steps next to Tenn alone, Purple a few feet behind rests a hesitant hand on the bear who bristles. Her bones are gelotian under her skin, she fumbles with trying to hold the coffin’s edge. Under the thorny hair and billowing dress, it is easy to tell she is breathing heavily. Everyone in the front row watches her pitiful attempt to fabricate words, hisses of pain rise out instead of syllables. 

When she looks ready to finally say something, the bear unhinges his mammoth jaws in a roar. The reverberating sound mimics humane excruciation as if comprehending his master’s death. It floods like the splashing shore of Norway with churning rocks and lily white foam into the world. Zib shivers. Then, the bear licks his inner thigh, sorrow forgotten. 

She straightens after, hissing halted. It is striking how sudden she composes herself. A hand raking through the saber-tooth tiger’s poisonous lavender jaws in her face, she speaks out clearly - it is easier for her to threaten then feel. “ _Membranes_ , I will pray that it was not you or any of yours’ who did this to her. I don’t want this pain to be shareable. Carry that.”

┅

“Mimi, bad cat,” Red scolds with a smile.

After the body was buried, people were allowed to roam the court and mingle like it was a party to whisper rumors over punchbowl. Of course, the puddle of crimson heard plenty. Instead of gossip over hat choices and new weddings, it was gossip of gun variety and dark magic. Zib had escaped it to enter the almost empty meadhall, finding Prince Red and Tak’s cat Mimi who was unkind to his hand that reached to gift scratches.

“I never did enjoy the companionship of a pet, wretched things they are.” Mimi slinks away, her spine a series of volatile coils, under a table and then further into the meadhall. Once out of sight, Zib glances at the beads of red below his knuckles discontentedly. “They never favored me much either. I like to think we have mutual opinions of one another.”

Red, spilling his taste-buds into his wine, guesses the last sentence is more about him than it is about pets. He rolls a sickly green olive between his fingers: “Well, pet ownership is not for everyone.” Zib nods his agreement. Juice begins to roll down Red’s index finger, nail dug into the olive. “...Like rulership.”

Zib’s face widens, an expression of intrigue blown like a latex balloon. His eyes, the chroma color enriching to this peach-yellow hue, shine hauntingly as he blinks. He looks like an owl who has just watched a mouse expose its vulnerable throat. Sealing his injury, his hands move over his heart. A crescent of teeth engulfs his face. 

Fluttering words escape from his mouth: “ _Yes_ . You understand; it is like rulership. A king is like a simple pet owner. If you are not feeding your house-cat then you are left with a corpse. Or this metaphor works - a king is a farmer who must tend to what needs to be taken care of. If the farmer is neglectful, what future awaits the crops? If the passion to cultivate was never there, why hand him a rake! Give the cat to the hopeful grandmother, give the shovel to the dirt-handed boy, _give the crown to- '' Me_ , but that is left a frog in his throat. Zib stops himself. Eyes dull, a more dirty amber coated in ash yet still sprouting heat. 

“I am getting carried away.”

His eyes flare up again, meeting Red’s scrutinizing gaze. Over a piece of cake, he is ogling him like someone would a bacteria under a microscope. _Does he know!_ Zib’s innard twist like wet rags that he might, suddenly needing to change the topic.

Zib twirls the fork from Red’s hand - as if he was a dancing partner that snatched a valuable item from his back pocket, delicate yet venomous. He stabs into velvety pound-cake, raising a piece to his mouth. “You know, about rulership, to me Milton has always depicted it best. He said: ‘better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n’ - as a boy, I had always seen those words as orthodox. A man flooded with grief is often very sage - it also helps that his eyes were as useless as stones drifting on effaced shores, suffering for others and himself. Mourners are the wisest of us.”

“Do you mourn?”

“I, mourn?” Light flickers over rotating fork tongs like blood spilling down stairs. “For a person, _no_ . Other things, without a doubt. Eventually, I will mourn when someone worth mourning dies. Life has yet to gift me tragic loss and wisdom like it has to Tak.” _Such a lucky girl,_ but he leaves that unsaid.

“Your mother has died. The woman who nursed you and birthed you died until you were eight. Everyone is able to conjure a vital memory from that age - the loss of a woman who you were connected to by flesh is worth mourning. You must mourn her.”

“My mother, oh no no, you misunderstand the relationship between my dear mother and I. You see, my mother was the first person in life to fail me, disappoint me, wrong me.” As he speaks of her misdeeds, the fork makes four uneven lightning bolts into white table cloth.

“She failed me on my birthday too. If only _dear_ mother had the consideration, kindness to squeeze me from her cunt sooner, it wouldn’t have to be this way. Do you know the time difference between him and I? Three and a half seconds before my head crowned. The time it takes your perfidious lungs to inhale oxygen once. I am a breath away from being king.” 

His pupils are dilated, the yellow encompassing them blown to a neon hue like two lighthouses. He looks crazed, his brown skin is dulling and seeming to blend with this incomparable green. His skin is how a painter might draw someone being seasick. But it is those surreptitious eyes which unnerve Red.

Red goes to ask what his second sentence is hinting, _it wouldn’t have to be this way,_ but he is already returning the fork. Hesitant, he takes the four wet tongs and winces. Lifting the fork and winking, Red watches the seventeen year old exit the meadhall and imagines the fork as a prison where he deserves to be.

Zib, licking at crumbs of delectable pound-cake on his warm lips, leaves one more sentence unsaid. _To be king, I only need to stop one person’s breath_. But what is often left unsaid still hangs in the air, insinuating and bleeding. In a certain method, it is already spoken.

“You know,” Zib lays a hand along the doorway beam, “my own mother thought I was a monster.” Red finally notices the bandage packed tight on his right earlobe. “She was right, of course.”

┅

It is a breath of fresh air to see Zim. As soon as their eyes meet in the meadhall and after a series blinks and winks in Morse code, two princes had managed narrowly to slip into Membrane’s garden to exit the suffocating grief. Neither of them bother to ask how the other is handling everything - little crescents of gray under eyes and fingers splintering with spasms are enough to know. 

“I know it must be hard to see your sibling like this,” Dib says. As of current, he is pinching a rose petal so it shrinks with half-moon indents. 

“ _Half-sibling_ ,” Zim seethes as if the word is a barrier. “It is already troublesome for Zim to share genetic blood with one pigeon-livered idiot, to even have another one!” His face draws into a crumpled paper wink, spitting out his tongue. A fake retch leaves his throat. 

Dib grumbles because fuck, how can he be plighted to a man so aloof. He compromises despite it: “Fine, it must be hard to see your _half_ -sibling like this.”

Zim hums at that, yet his hunched shoulders untighten. “Tak is tough. Zim has no doubt that when duty calls, she will be first among the Empire fleet’s to answer. This is just a momentary setback, Tak will take three steps forward when she wants.” Pointed fingernails are tapping agitatedly at his pink sleeve though.

“I just can’t believe it,” Dib laments, “they were going to be married in June and now they are not. You know the pound-cake we served?; we were planning on giving it to Tak as a congratulation gift to soothe the kingdom’s quarrels.”

They sit in silence for a while, weighing their existence for a while. Their awaiting wedding will resemble a peace treaty if it must, their wedding kiss as a signed document. It is insidious. It is enough to make them both wait to expel that sweet crumbs they had eaten innocently from themselves.

“Good cake, though.” They lie.

“Yeah. Good cake.” They lie again.

“You are going to get yourself killed months before our wedding, right?”

“I mean, you are pretty annoying,” Dib draws out. His shoulder is quickly hit, sending him coughing as Zim loudly argues that he is not annoying, you infuriating swine! Laughing, Dib continues: “And I have been hearing things about werewolves and autumn, so. I’m kidding. I’m kidding,” Dib assures when catching the scowl on Zim’s face. 

“Besides,” Dib goes to say when he shivers, a cloud of ice falling upon like winter. He does not even need to turn around to recognize Zim’s mother. It is intimidating enough to be married to her son, to look into those ice blue eggs that spark with blue fire with no heat is a fate worse than death, to view the ivory wires jutting from her gray animal draped on her collarbones like spider’s jaws adds a second shiver.

“We should be leaving now, Prince Zim. I loathe lingering in such desolate places.” She blinks, suddenly remembering who else is there. “Oh, Dib, I am sorry that you two must reunite under these circumstances.” 

Dib finally turns around from his place on the garden bench. Under him, feet shift uneasily. How does one go about apologizing for all of his kingdom’s behavior and suspicions? She appears just as uncomfortable as him, glancing uneasily between the lush greenery she is sandwiched in. “Empress Miyuki, I want you to know, I am incredibly sorry for how my kingdom has been to yours. It is completely disrespectful and -”

“Nonsense. Next time, we shall have warmth in our hearts and mead in our stomach. If the court allows it, I’ve arranged the arrival of the Irken dancing fleet next summer solstice. I was thinking, with the rumors and all, that the lack of us sharing cultures might be causing some unrest. Neither of us wish for any bad blood, I assume.” 

Dib nods his head vigorously. “That is good, Prince Membrane. Until next time, yes?” Her smile looks painful to Dib. Teeth are grounded taut, as if the enamels were tediously stitched together, and it didn’t seem to fit her face. A smile did not seem to fit her entire demeanor entirely. “Goodbye, you two. Zim, be in the carriage in at least five minutes please.”

When her footsteps are no longer audible, Dib flicks away the petal he had been fiddling with once tiny white stalactites grow on it. It is undoubtedly a layer of permafrost. “Your mother makes my blood run cold.”

“Ah, yes, she has that charming effect on people,” Zim notes, rubbing his hands down the length of Dib’s shoulders to his elbows. With a gentle pace, he takes one of his bethroned’s frostbitten hands. Dib bites his nails like a mouse nibbles cheese. “Rumor has it my mother has a heart of ice. Your people see her as aloof.”

“Is she? Is she cruel?” Dib asks anxiously, trying to ignore how easily his blood rushes like a newborn river just from simple hand-holding. Zim denies the accusation, something along the lines of her being just another mother. “Do you love her?”

“Do you love yours?”

Under the arched eyebrow, Dib feels something roil in his stomach, unsoundly like sand. “I don’t think I had enough time with her to decide.”

“Me neither.”

┅

Dib had no idea how to bid them a proper, royal goodbye. It was only a brief intermission but felt more significant - his father always made him wish visitors a safe travels as it was his preparation for rulership. 

He had bid skittish Tenn goodnight on one of these carriage before missing papers reared their ugly head. To his utter devastation, he cannot conjure much of the memory up. It is like sticking a wire down a shower drain and grappling with slippery hair, trying to remember her last moments. Had he said ‘goodnight’ or ‘have a good night’; did the difference matter in the grand scheme of things? Dib, who feels petite as he stares up at the royal family from the lower stair, tries to recall if Tenn’s dress was spanish carmine red or a hibiscus red.

He swallows a rock of apprehension, reminds himself it is not his fault, and opens his mouth. A spill of apologies and farewells spew out, forgettable wisps of cotton on his tongue. He only remembers how Zim is looking at him, loving and encouraging because he knows how hard this speech is. Besides, how can you _truly_ apologize to someone when as far as they are concerned you by some extension did this to them?

He ends off with this, forcing himself to recall it: “I hope you all manage to have a pleasant night, may each rest soothe an inch of your pain.” He thinks it sounds good - pompous and respectful, yes? Tak’s reaction says no.

She blinks three times, looks around as if she is a dizzy bird thrown from a high altitude - _had she forgotten anything inside_ , Dib wonders, ready to order someone to retrieve what she needed. Her eyes, these big mushrooms of incomparable gloom, find Dib in their tired track. Two tears race down her cheek. Her skin is a sickly oatmeal hue under those lucid vines of violet. She looks ready to faint as someone shakes her knee lightly. Then, as if tangible grief has been boiling inside in a lidded pot and the lid shatters, she starts to scream. 

Grief fumes out of her in two teapot bursts before she is _really_ lamenting. Whoever is touching her moves as if burnt. Her body moves in a withering snake pattern, certain limbs ballooning or shrinking as if she is struck by lightning. Howling, she slumps into the neck of Mor’du, the bear. Stricken Mimi jumps off her lap, huddling into someone else’s. Cries - as if someone is shredding her brain - flame from her mouth. A hand touches her shoulder. Someone - could be Purple or Zim - voice’s is a whisper compared to hers: “Oh, Tak, dear, don’t, please, _oh Tak_.” 

Dib knows it is rude - he is not trying to be, believe him, he is not - but he can feel his right hand itch up as if going to block his ears. Instead, he places his dominant hand over the heart in his neck and digs in fingernails. His face is a wince. 

It gets worse, abstruse yet true. In mere seconds, as Tak is coughing out every single of her lament in shrill screams, the strangest noise arises volcanic from the bear’s lungs. A mix of a growl or howl arises from black lips, bleeding gums, and orangish-white teeth. What makes it worse, adds another sorrowful layer, is Mor'du growls sound like words like how sometimes it sounds like a cat or dog can manipulate its vocal chords to say hello. Mor’du words are nothing like a greeting.

Red pounds twice on the roof, signaling for them to leave. The driver stalls, tears pricking at their own eyes as Tak’s inscrutable grief is in them too. They move in a jolt after four more thunderous knocks. Carriage bobbing, the horses rush off, dizzy in the stridency.

“That poor, poor girl,” their father comments, standing behind his three children. Then, to accompany the decreasing sound of wheels on cobblestone, footsteps start to move.

It is Dib who lingers in a seat of desolation, not able to bring himself to imagine Zim’s agony of having to endear each atom of Tak’s lament and a bear’s growls - _‘for death, for death, for death’_ \- bouncing off their cloth prison for an entire two hours. Even listening to the shrinking cacophony and watching the carriage blur into blue, he hears it. For death for death for death. 

He wipes the water on his face paper thin. With a final squint, just hoping he might glimpse the sight of back wheels or pinkening red curtains so he has an excuse to linger longer, Dib retires to the castle’s stomach for his own death.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't decide if I want to see Tak or Zib go apeshit and that is the bi dilemma. Also at the time, I had not known at the time Tak's position in the AU so I just gave myself creative liberty.  
> Also!  
> Zib, flirting after his brother is stuck in a mirror: That’s a sharp outfit, Zim. Careful, you could puncture the hull of an Empire-class Irken battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea. Because ... it’s so **s h a r p ******


End file.
